« Consciousness is as "Long for This World" as Matter »

Jonathan Weiner (in "Long for the World"): "The trouble with immortality is endless.  The thought of it brings us into contact with problems of time itself - with shapeless problems we have never grasped and may never put into words.  Our ability to exist in time may require our being mortal, although we can't understand that any more than the fish can understand water.  What we call the stream of conciousness may depend upon mortality in ways that we can hardly glimpse." (my italics)

PS: I guess.  Without time, just like without gravity, the stream (of consciousness) is just a stirring cognitive swamp with nowhere to go.  Perhaps. 

But perhaps, not.  We don't "exist in time."  Time isn't some objective context to exist in, to live in; time is mindform, subjective intra-personal context (for some it drags, for some it flies); time is not external medium, but mind itself.  No consciousness - no time.  Consciousness = time.  "Stream of consciousness" depends on mortality only insofar as mind depends on body.  The content of the mind (of the stream of consciousness) may or may not be related to aging. But the very fact of mind's existence, it seems, is unrelated to "mortality," i.e. to aging, as Weiner seems to suggest in concluding pages of his "Long for the World." 

To claim that consciousness is function of "mortality," i.e. not just of body but of an aging body is to possibly misunderstand the ontological basis of consciousness [not that I am personally sure of what it is myself!].  Consciousness, as I see it, is not a "function" of any body (be it mortal or immortal, organic or AI), but a fundamental characteristic of all matter in the Universe.  Consciousness, as I think it, is not a derivative of structure, but an ontological parameter of matter itself. 

And as such, consciousness is as long for this world as the matter itself, i.e. inextinguishable.  Which is not to be confused with the issue of permanence of our sense of "self."  "Self," while a form of consciousness (i.e. a mindform), is too continuously arising-and-ceasing to qualify for existence in the first place.